It is hard to not hear the voices of Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle (authors of Be Here Now and The Power of Now respectively) in Kabat-Zinn’s description — they also sacralize the present. It can certainly be pleasant to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,” to quote Timothy Leary via John Lennon. The cliché of simply being present — the holy grail of mindfulness, and the essence of Kabat-Zinn’s “essential dharma” — elevates resting in “being” to the functional equivalent of spiritual awakening. But this is not how the Buddha defined liberation. He taught a middle path between the extremes of being and non-being, clinging to neither. Fetishizing present experience runs the risk of reducing mindfulness to a pop philosophy that relishes an amoral immediacy of being, undermining critical forethought and ethical awareness of the consequentiality of past and future actions.
There are therapeutic benefits to present-moment awareness, but it can also subtly strengthen the sense of being a separate self, existing independently of other phenomena (a prime cause of suffering, according to Buddhism). This happens because MBSR presupposes a split between the observing subject, who is located “here”, and “the present” they are told to pay attention to, which is over “there.” In this dualistic schema, the observing subject is separated from the present moment and must make a concerted effort to apprehend and capture it by focusing attention on its apparent location.
One could interpret the injunction to “be here now” as a meditative effort to locate the “here” of the subject and the “there” of the present in one place. However, teachers encourage self-orientation via achievement, reinforcing a separate location. Practitioners of mindfulness are in a constant mode of self-surveillance, checking up on their progress (or lack thereof) towards “being present.” This is the ultimate goal in MBSR, yet merely the first step in Buddhist mindfulness teachings based on the Satipatthana Sutta. Deeper levels of practice develop clear insight into all constituents of temporal experience as inconstant and unsatisfactory. When seen clearly for what it actually is, the present moment is like any other mental object — a transitory fabrication to be viewed with dispassion rather than fetishized.
Mindfulness and
Perennial Transcendentalism
The mystification of a personal experience of “being present” owes more to American religious history than to Buddhism. Some of this is conscious on the part of Kabat-Zinn, whose books make regular references to Henry David Thoreau and other nineteenth-century Transcendentalists. In Coming to Our Senses, he quotes Thoreau’s back-to-nature classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.21
Kabat-Zinn compares this to his own philosophy of “living in harmony with oneself and with the world,” while “cultivating some appreciation for the fullness of each moment we are alive.” As he explains: “Thoreau saw the same problem with our ordinary mind state in New England in 1846 and wrote with great passion about its unfortunate consequences.”22
Retreating to a cabin on land owned by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau turned his back on the horrors of industrialization and injustice, focusing instead on a simpler existence and transcending the mundane through contemplation. Kabat-Zinn calls Thoreau’s experience “a personal experiment in mindfulness. He chose to put his life on the line in order to revel in the wonder and simplicity of present moments.”23 Like Thoreau and Emerson, Kabat-Zinn reels off reasons to feel disenchanted with modern life, while offering a path to re-enchantment through retreat, if not physically then psychologically — in mindfulness practice.
The Transcendentalist focus on direct experience had Eastern influences. Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita at Walden Pond, drawing on its ideas — like Emerson and Walt Whitman — to see a universal freedom in oneness with nature. Early Western translations of other Asian texts found a captive audience in New England, taking root in the fertile soil of Transcendentalism. “For Emerson,” writes the scholar of religion Arthur Versluis, “the significance of Asian religions — of all human history — consists of assimilation into the present, into the here and now.”24
By the end of the nineteenth century, adds Rick Fields, a historian of Buddhism in the US, “the drawing rooms of Boston were awash with mysticism, occult fancies and Eastern religions.”25
One manifestation of this trend was Theosophy, a mix of Western esotericism and mystical ideas from Hinduism and
Buddhism. Founded in New York in 1875, the Theosophical Society aimed to construct a universal doctrine based on science and experiential insight. Another influential development was New Thought, a “mind cure” whose positive psychology inspires modern cults of “The Law of Attraction.”
The general focus on cultivating wellness through mental powers impressed the psychologist William James, who called it a “religion of healthy-mindedness.” As he described it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.”26 James, like Kabat-Zinn, valorized “the intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception.”27 He thereby laid the foundation for New Age thinkers, who — to borrow a phrase from Emmanuel Lévinas — reduce James’ insights to “cheap mysticism.”
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James describes direct encounters with a common mystical basis for all religion — like the “universal dharma” of Kabat-Zinnism. This appeal to “perennial philosophy” — a phrase later popularized by Aldous Huxley — strips meditative practice of cultural context. It is said instead to give privileged access to “pure awareness,” free from history and sectarian boundaries. James helped to make personal experience the primary source of truth and religious authority. This rationalized faith, staking out a private realm for religion beyond scientific measurement. Essentially an anti-authoritarian doctrine, James’ radical empiricism shifted power from institutions to individuals. It thus enabled New Age gurus and meditation teachers to claim authority from first-hand experience, while defending a “universal dharma” from critique.
Perennial philosophy also informed D.T. Suzuki’s revisionist Zen, which influenced the Beats and brought Buddhist meditation to public attention in the 1950s. Just as Suzuki claimed that Zen offered access to a pure, unmediated, timeless essence of mystical experience, Kabat-Zinn has done the same for mindfulness, privileging it as the essential core of Buddhism. This unbundles the concept, so an “open-source” practice is more easily appropriated. As David McMahan reflects in The Making of Buddhist Modernism, a thread links Transcendentalism, Suzuki’s ideas and MBSR:
The internalization of religion, the attribution of religious significance to the natural world, the emphasis on solitary contemplation of nature, and the view such contemplation as a remedy for the excessive materialism of the modern world all served as essential ingredients in the interpretation of Buddhism in the West, particularly North America.28
There is only one drawback. For most of the history of meditative practice, doctrinal context has defined the experience. Its priorities are often very different from our own. “It is not just that advanced meditation practitioners in more traditional Asian settings may not exhibit the kinds of behavior that we associate with mental health,” notes the scholar of Buddhism Robert Sharf. “It is not clear that they aspire to our model of mental health in the first place.”29 Meanwhile, the very idea of “pure awareness,” the decontextualized basis of perennial philosophy, is contested. Although we can turn down the volume on thoughts, our mental conditioning still runs in the background. “Sense experience never operates in an unmediated fashion,” explains Richard Cohen in Beyond Enlightenment. “What seems to be direct perception of worldly objects is, in fact, always already an amalgam of sense impressions and intellection.”30
However, stripped of the traditional context that makes it make sense, a “mindfulness-only” approach now defines meditation, potentially producing self-centered adherents.
Meditation Sickness
Conflating mindfulness with present-moment awareness was seen as a hazard in Buddhist traditions with only one practice. Early Chan patriarchs also taught meditation to cultivate “no mind” through intense immersion in the here-and-now, inducing deep tranquility and non-discursive awareness. This “silent illumination” approach became quite prevalent in eighth-century China, promoted to the laity as a practice that promised quick results, with no requirements for doctrinal study or ethical training, like MBSR. However, the Song dynasty Chan master Dahui cautioned that this method could lead to the “malady of meditation,” in which consciousness of stillness is mistaken for one’s own true nature. Hakuin, a master of Zen, was also critical, fearing that meditators fell prey to “dead sitting,” attached to quietude and inactivity, with no concern for the suffering of the world. And the eighth-century Indian master Kamalaśila warned that practitioners who wrongly tried to stop thinking would spend five hundred eons as mindless zombies.
The veneration of “bare attention” to the present moment in MBSR derives from Nyañaponika Thera’s classic The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, first published in English sixty years ago. Its cover now features an endorsement from Kabat-Zinn: “The book that started it all.” Nyañaponika’s instructions for beginners suggest: “a bare registering of the facts observed, without reacting to them by deed, speech or by mental comment.” However, if “comments arise in one’s mind, they themselves are made objects of Bare Attention, and are neither repudiated nor pursued.”31
Mental training in non-elaborative “bare attention” has therapeutic benefits, not just calming the mind but decentering awareness to observe thoughts and feelings as passing events, not the way things are. Yet Nyañaponika never said mindfulness should be translated as “bare attention.” His long-time student, Bhikkhu Bodhi, recalls him disapproving of how contemporary vipassana teachers misinterpret bare attention. He would sometimes shake his head, saying: “But that’s not what I meant at all!”32
Modern secular mindfulness precludes discussion of context, or the purpose of practice beyond feeling better. It is regarded as blasphemous to question this, since it is assumed a priori that mindfulness is always beneficial. And since it supposedly offers direct access to the essence of Buddhism, to interrogate its applications or ends would be to refuse “the gift of the dharma.” Even when these ends are benign, such as offering mindfulness in a medical or therapeutic context, mindfulness is seen as a means to those ends, which alters and reorients the meaning of the practice itself.
This is legitimized with Kabat-Zinn’s essentialist and universalizing rhetoric. It has led many to believe that, as isolated subjects, they have private access to the essence of the “dharma,” independent of their own dominant cultural values. Once mindfulness has been decontextualized, and reduced to an instrumentalized technique, it can be applied in any context, without any need for critical questioning of the ends it serves. Whether mindfulness is used by US Marines to optimize battlefield performance in Afghanistan, or — as one senior manager at Google put it — “as an organizational WD-40, a necessary lubricant between driven, ambitious employees and Google’s demanding corporate culture,” it makes no difference.33 Mindfulness works and it’s a Good Thing.
With this self-congratulatory branding, mindfulness sells well on the spiritual marketplace as a means to success. In What’s Wrong with Mindfulness, Barry Magid and Robert Rosenbaum call this a “for-gain, workshop approach.”34
Mindfulness is marketed as a goal-oriented tool for self-improvement. It promises consumers a short-term fix in the form of relief, whether from stress, relationship difficulties, chronic illness, lack of focus at work or poor academic performance. “Materialistic, for-gain Buddhism may well be an unavoidable part of Buddhism’s transmission to the West,” note Magid and Rosenbaum. However, they warn that denying the significance of context means “it adapts to, and is translated into, the deep-rooted individualist, materialist, and secular structures of Western culture — including the culture of science as itself a technique for achieving control and thus better satisfying needs.”35
MBSR appeals to modern sensibilities, catering particularly to the “spiritual but not religious.” In just eight weeks one can learn a form of meditation without Buddhist trappings, which are replaced by the sanctification of personal experience. This serves to strengthen people’s conceptions of themselves as self-contained and autonomous agents, rather than as relational and interdependent — and an individualized practice requires no communal ties, moral commitments, or substantive lifestyle changes. Instead, one can be mindful in any way one likes, while washing the dishes, taking in a sunset, smelling an orange, or having sex or sipping wine.
Like his nineteenth-century forebears — Thoreau, Emerson and James — Kabat-Zinn rejects the authority of social and religious institutions. Instead, he salutes the power of individuals. Appealing to a “do-it-yourself” form of American pragmatism, he asserts: “Each person is already the world authority on him- or herself, or at least could be if they started attending to things mindfully.”36
chapter six
Mindfulness as Social Amnesia
In case you’re wondering, I have tried mindfulness. Let me take you back to my first session of an eight-week course on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The teacher was a stocky, bald man of few words. As with most new group endeavors, the introductory session felt awkward and guarded. I knew from my reading that I would soon be facing the MBSR initiation rite: the slow eating of a raisin, an exercise that I was honestly not looking forward to doing. Being a good sport, I summoned what patience I had, gazed attentively at the raisin for a few seconds (naturally, it was organic) and took a small nibble. I’ve been to foodie meccas in Italy — Parma, Bologna, Reggio Emilia — so the ritual of eating slowly was not new, but it’s hard to be sure I was eating mindfully.
Over the next few weeks, I began to gain a much deeper appreciation of how MBSR was responding to a longing in Western culture, and how this method, course, or whatever you want to call it, was serving some unmet needs of late-capitalist society. I felt a little out of place. Of the twenty-five or so participants, most were women. As we went around the room and introduced ourselves, explaining what had brought us there, I felt like I was listening to the walking wounded. Many had lost jobs without warning. Others faced the strains of having to work long hours, sometimes two jobs, while caring for others. For a number of women, this was their second or third round of the course. Divorces, bereavements, stories of chronic pain, and a sense of malaise haunted the room. Nearly half of the participants had been referred by their psychotherapists.
Clearly, MBSR is a saving grace for many people, especially those who might not otherwise encounter meditative practices. Within a few weeks, participants on the course were describing the innumerable benefits they felt from the “body scan” exercise; some even reported that it helped them sleep better. The MBSR teacher was certainly sincere and competent. The course was accomplishing exactly what it was intended to do: teach people how to reduce their stress and anxiety, cope with pain, and live a more mindful life. Then why was I unsettled, and experiencing vague irritation?
Was I restless and bothered because of how mindfulness was being presented, as a simple technique without an ethical framework or social purpose? Not really. As far as I could tell, there were no serial killers among us — or cutthroat twenty-six-year-old Uber executives. I had also taken a few courses at Buddhist Insight Meditation Centers, and ethics were not on their agenda either. That wasn’t the issue. I briefly came back to my senses as the MBSR instructor led us in a guided sitting meditation. Minutes into the exercise, I had a flashback, or what the teacher called “mind-wandering” — sort of the opposite of focusing on now. Disregarding the instr
uctions to be in the present moment, I decide to indulge the memory, at least a little.
I am back to being eighteen, working as an industrial electrician at one of the largest manufacturing plants on Chicago’s South Side. Suited in overalls, with a beat-up, red hard hat over straggly hair, I am anxiously staring at the time clock with everyone else — a group ritual of silence, waiting for the hand to strike the hour so I can punch out. In front of me are hunched-over workers — a few pipefitters who have punched this time clock for the last thirty years of their lives. But on this day, my gaze shifts from the clock to the faces of alienation in front of me. And wait a minute… These workers’ faces are not all that dissimilar to the looks of defeat I saw a few weeks earlier in my MBSR cohort — the vacant stares, the pained faces, the anxious waiting for time to change. This past was the present, appearing differently.
Being a bad MBSR student, I began ruminating further. What about these walking wounded I once worked with? Would MBSR have helped them too if it had been around then? Would they have stopped punching the time clock if they practiced mindfulness? Would MBSR have made them more mindful at work, allowing them to appreciate and enjoy the routine and monotony of the assembly line? Could they have even afforded an MBSR course? Perhaps the animosity and strained labor-management relations, along with the militant labor unions, would have all become obsolete if corporate mindfulness training had been available? Would this have been a good thing? Who’d have benefited?
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